Beautiful \ Nightcoach

Alan:  My French was always exécrable.  I’m happy enough to muddle along in English, knowing it has a way of sopping up other languages’ gravy.

Beautiful

The most beautiful words in English,

my father declared, one supper,

to his family whose minds opened

like the mouths of baby birds,

were – according to a Frenchman

he said he’d met through work

(oh, exotic arbiter!) – “cellar door.”

So under-appreciated an object

to roll so golden off the tongue!

Handcuffed by first-year French, still

I could hear the resonance, for one

whose “that, of gold” was “cela, d’or.”

Later, I found the record label l’Oiseau-Lyre,

the lyrebird, and judged

the stranger had the better of us there.

Still later, meeting in school Yeats’

jeweled automaton, Stevens’ gold-feathered bird,

I felt the music we all seek

comes not from cages or ideal palms

but from the quibble of rusty hinges

and the half-felt must of air

reaching from cool and freshly opened ground.

Nancy:  I loved trains.  I loved the motion, the sound, the world passing, the imaginary lives I lived vicariously, the history and stories I played out as the landscape flowed past, my imaginary other selves.

Nightcoach

Kettaklak, kettaklak

thousands of miles asleep with my head on the rough upholstery

and awake

kettaklak

writing my name in the coaldust on the windowsills

a railroad man’s daughter

in the backyards of a thousand small towns

watching their milkmen

their empty night streets

kettaklak, click, kettaklak

beating them to their own dawns, and

sleeping again

to the roll, the long whistle

kettaklak, lullaby, kettaklak

it gets in the blood

of a railroad man’s child

“Night Coach” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.